Al Gore's Ptolemaic epicycles are being rolled onto the scientific stage, to be piled higher and deeper until they fit the curve of real temperatures -- a nearly flat line with a little bit of jitter. You could just turn it into a single equation: T = 70°F on an average day, for the average weather station around the world.

But ... if you've been betting your whole career on planetary doom, you might try adding enough stratospheric water vapor to your predicted (but never observed) global warming, and yes, then your computer model can still explain why global warming ain't happening.

Personally, I'd go for the flat line. It's a lot simpler.

Oh, global warming is so 2009. Last year they told us it was already happening. Run for your lives, kids! It was "settled science." Rational skeptics were "deniers" and James Hansen wanted them all in jail for "crimes against humanity." Obama promised with that great messianic reverb on his woofers to "stop the seas from ri-ising!" 'Cause ... 'cause the polar bears were dying! Vanuatu was slipping under the ocean! And it's all your fault! And we need the money! (That's nine trillion dollars, according to Lord Nicholas Stern, the British economist who gave us the official price tag.)

I sometimes wonder if Al Gore was scared as a young child by an Elmer Gantry revival meeting back in rural Tennessee. Maybe his Dad, Al Gore Sr., took little Al along for a little politickin' at the tent meetin', and he learned all about Hell and damnation from the preacher.

Dr. Roy Spencer has been one of the gutsy climate scientists pointing to water vapor as a temperature-modulating gas for a long, long time. It's not a secret. Hot water vapor is what makes steam locomotives run, after all, and that choo-choo sound comes from letting off steam pressure, just like Mother Earth must somehow do to maintain reasonable temperature constancy over millions of years. The Earth can pump that steam into the atmosphere, and get a little convection cooling into the bargain. All that H2O has to be a big factor in the Earth's heat budget. But not in the Gospel according to Al. There's a lot more money in carbon than in water vapor.